


I Break, I Break (We Build)

by anextraordinarymuse (December_Daughter)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 06:38:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6743335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/December_Daughter/pseuds/anextraordinarymuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set post season 2. Someone finally hugs Abby.</p>
<p>Moving it over from my tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Break, I Break (We Build)

**Author's Note:**

> So I’m at the end of season two of The 100 and I just really, really want to see someone hug Abby - that someone being Marcus Kane, of course. So this happened.

After so long in space, in the Ark, where everything was grey and industrial and bleak – after everything, Abby can’t bring herself to hate color. Almost, but not quite; she can resent it in weaker moments, and she does. Abby looks up into the emerald tree tops; looks up at the mountain peaks capped with white, and beyond them into a sky so blue it makes her blink; she looks, and looks, and begs the world to be black and white just for a moment.

_Please_ , Abby prays to no one, _please be simple. Good guys, bad guys, right and wrong; please give me one thing, one moment that’s easy._

Abby is a doctor. She’s a logical, analytical person, and she knows that helpless pleas rarely accomplish anything. There’s no one up there to hear to her pleas anyway. If there were … if there were, maybe Jake would still be alive. Maybe she could have saved Clarke – at any turn, and every turn.

Maybe she could have saved everyone.

“Abby.”

She lifts her head off her crossed arms with no energy and little concern. The night is an inky blackness around her: in the daylight, she will be strong; in the daylight, she will pull herself together; but right now, under cover of darkness, this moment is hers.

Marcus lowers himself to the ground next to her without a word. He doesn’t shy from the tears on her cheeks, or the heaviness that compresses her bones until she fears they’ll grind to dust – she knows Marcus sees the strain, but he says nothing.

He’s so quiet, this Marcus. Not quiet in the ways he was before, because there is no cold aloofness in his manner now; only compassion and a deep, deep regret.

This is who they are now: the broken people who have bathed the line between good and evil in the blood of so many people that Abby is certain they’ll drown.

Marcus reaches slowly across the marginal gap that separates them and sets a hand on her arm. There’s something about that touch – such a small thing, really, the skin of his palm warm against the exposed flesh of her arm – that makes the air rattle in her chest. The sound isn’t tangible, really, more of a feeling than a real noise, but it heralds something Abby fears: a break down.

She can’t break down. She only has one moment – this moment – to let the weakness slow her. Abby knows that … but the tears have started, and each one that falls takes a name with it, and a memory, and a regret, and a piece of her soul that Abby will never get back.

Abby’s head falls back onto the pillow of her arms, and her cheek brushes the skin of Marcus’s hand.

He feels her tears cool against the back of his hand. They each have enough grief on their own to carry them to the end of the world, but Abby’s tears … they wound him.

“Abby.”

Marcus pulls his hand slowly out from beneath her cheek and slides it across the back of her neck, beneath the curtain of her hair, and pulls her gently into his side. Abby doesn’t lean against him, but falls – crashes into him as much as her slight form allows and then breaks apart like the proverbial ocean waves upon the rocks.

Marcus holds her, one arm around her shoulders and his cheek pressed against the crown of her head, until the dark of night turns into the grey of pre-dawn.

Abby breathes deep and listens to the heart beating against her ear. One minute of grief has become too many, but she no longer feels like she’s bleeding, and breaking.

The world is not black and white: it’s full of color, and lines that fluctuate and diverge at the slightest provocation.

But right now the sun is rising, and the colors aren’t blinding, and the weight of Marcus’s arm has held the pieces of her in place long enough for her to pull them together again.

This moment – here, with Marcus at the break of dawn - this, at last, is easy.


End file.
